Pedagogy of Play - Full Blog Posts Archive

Hello and welcome to the blog of the Pedagogy of Play research project! In 2014, the LEGO Foundation and Project Zero, a research organization at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, began thinking together about learning through play. What is the role of play in empowering children to be lifelong learners? What does school-based playful learning and teaching look and feel like? How can a culture of playful learning be cultivated and sustained in schools?

The Pedagogy of Play (PoP) initiative officially took shape in 2015 with a playful participatory research project based at the International School of Billund (ISB), Denmark. With a mission and vision founded on the belief that play is a core resource for how children learn, ISB was fertile ground for exploring our questions. This co-created research inspired a working set of playful learning principles, practices, and tools and was the inspiration for an evolving pedagogy of play framework.

While this early research was grounded in Denmark, we knew that playful learning is shaped by culture and context — that is, what play looks and feels like in one place is likely not the same in another. So, we then expanded our research to explore other contexts of playful learning and investigate what a cross-cultural pedagogy of play might look like. In 2017 we began working with three schools in the Johannesburg and Pretoria regions of South Africa. In 2019, we partnered with six schools in the Boston area, USA. And in 2020 we identified five schools in Bogota, Colombia with whom to collaborate.

As we dove into playful learning and teaching, we found ourselves thinking deeply about everything from the relationship between play and democracy to playful dispositions (for learners and teachers). In this blog, we share thoughts, questions, and stories from the classroom, featuring both our research network and guest bloggers along the way.

We hope this blog provides a mental playground for tinkering with ideas and building a community of playful thinkers and thoughtful players